A miner stands in front of the tunnel drilling machine 'Sissi' after it broke through the rock at the final section Faido-Sedrun, at the construction site of the NEAT Gotthard Base Tunnel in the Swiss Alps, October 2010

Accelerate physics with your own computer: The Large Hadron Collider is one of the biggest, most complex machines in the world. And physicists are reviving the volunteer computing project Sixtrack, part of LHC to design the 2020 upgrade.

Large Hadron Collider, CERN - Lowering of one of the two ATLAS muon small wheels into the cavern

Canton de Genève / This hall will house the Compact muon solenoid detector at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory) . The detector will be placed around the CERN's highest energy particle accelerator. Proton beams will be accelerated and collided head on in the LHC, and the CMS will detect the resultant particles. The goal of the experiment is the discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, but yet to be directly…